Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Form a haskell.org committee

2010-09-07 Thread Bryan O'Sullivan
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Jason Dagit da...@codersbase.com wrote:

 The darcs project uses the Software Freedom Conservancy as a sort of
 legal entity to hold on to funds and also to help in case anyone takes
 legal action against darcs or darcs needs to take legal action.


I have only the highest praise for the Software Freedom Conservancy folks.
They are smart, capabale, and very accommodating.
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[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Form a haskell.org committee

2010-09-05 Thread Ian Lynagh

Dear Haskellers,

In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money
from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc
machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this
money: on the community server, on a server to take over hosting
haskell.org itself, and on the haskell.org domain name. There is also
interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as
Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees.

However, it is not currently clear who is responsible for determining
what the haskell.org money should be spent on, or what are and are not
acceptable uses of the domain name and hardware.

To fix this problem, we propose that we create a haskell.org
committee, which is responsible for answering these sorts of questions,
although for some questions they may choose to poll the community at
large if they think appropriate.

We suggest that the committee be composed of 5 representatives from the
community, with committee members standing down after at most 3 years.
Each year the committee will appoint one of their members to be the chair.

As membership of the Haskell community is not well-defined, and voting
would potentially be open to abuse if anyone were able to vote, we
propose that the committee should choose their replacements from open
nominations.

Unfortunately, this gives us a bootstrapping problem, so we suggest that
the initial committee be chosen from open nominations by some of the
people who currently de-facto end up making the decisions currently:
Duncan Coutts, Isaac Jones, Ian Lynagh, Don Stewart and Malcolm Wallace.
These 5 would still be elligible to nominate themselves. Two of the
initial members will stand down after one year, and two after two years,
in order to bootstrap rolling membership turnover.


We would love to hear feedback from you about this proposal,
so that we can see whether the proposal, or something similar,
has consensus amongst the community!


A related issue is that haskell.org does not currently exist as a legal
entity. We also hope to solve that problem, but we are still gathering
information so that the community can make an informed decision, so I
won't say more about that for now.


Thanks
Ian

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Form a haskell.org committee

2010-09-05 Thread Jason Dagit
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Ian Lynagh ig...@earth.li wrote:

 Dear Haskellers,

 In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money
 from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc
 machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this
 money: on the community server, on a server to take over hosting
 haskell.org itself, and on the haskell.org domain name. There is also
 interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as
 Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees.

 However, it is not currently clear who is responsible for determining
 what the haskell.org money should be spent on, or what are and are not
 acceptable uses of the domain name and hardware.

The darcs project uses the Software Freedom Conservancy as a sort of
legal entity to hold on to funds and also to help in case anyone takes
legal action against darcs or darcs needs to take legal action.

You might consider joining the SFC as haskell.org.  I don't know
enough about the SFC or haskell.org to know if it would be beneficial,
so I'm just sort of throwing it out there as something to investigate.
 You might talk to Eric Kow if you're interested.  I believe he
coordinated the process.

http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/

Jason
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